Minisforum MS-01 PCIe Card and RAM Compatibility Thread

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ms264556

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Sep 13, 2021
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New Zealand
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Notice the copper heatpipe and look at the cleaned heatsink cpu surface looks plated to me. Usually copper heatpipes mean its plated copper. The fins look aluminum. Correct me if I am wrong.
Yeah, it does look plated.

I guess you'll let us know if your heatsink melts. :p

20° is a great improvement , so I'm willing to take a punt if your PC is still working next week.
 
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benjvfr

New Member
Feb 19, 2024
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Has anyone tested Sparkle A310 Eco with MS-01? I just received mine, but I'm still waiting for MS-01 to arrive (ordered an early bird...). It seems to be the only Intel ARC card which will fit in MS-01. It's probably comparable to iGPU in 13900H, but I want to have two GPUs so one can be passed through to specific VM all the time and second to be available for other VMs when needed.
When you passthrough the dedicated Intel Arc GPU to a guest VM (on Proxmox), can the iGPU be still usable by the Proxmox host (for access to the console via the HDMI port) ?

Because, as I understand, you need to probe the i915 driver (echo i915 > etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, see here) making the iGPU not usable by the host (because i915 is the driver used for both iGPU and Intel Arc GPU). I'm I missing something ?
 
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GreenAvacado

Active Member
Sep 25, 2022
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Notice the copper heatpipe and look at the cleaned heatsink cpu surface looks plated to me polished aluminum is really shiny. Usually copper heatpipes mean its plated copper. The fins look aluminum. Correct me if I am wrong?
"Gallium diffuses into copper, meaning a copper heatsink will be effectively welded to any surface it comes into contact with when exposed to liquid metal and the heat cycle of the GPU. If the heatsink is nickel plated, then you should be okay. The only effect will be staining."

Just read this. What is the general consensus on LM on MS01 heatsink? Go for it or skip?
 

wadup

Member
Feb 13, 2024
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"Gallium diffuses into copper, meaning a copper heatsink will be effectively welded to any surface it comes into contact with when exposed to liquid metal and the heat cycle of the GPU. If the heatsink is nickel plated, then you should be okay. The only effect will be staining."

Just read this. What is the general consensus on LM on MS01 heatsink? Go for it or skip?
Screenshot 2024-02-29 120955.png
Screenshot 2024-02-29 122224.png

Copper diffusing/plating there is no performance impact, it continues to cool just as good with the initial application of LM.

Aluminum is in the middle and the one to be avoided. Does anyone even make aluminum heatsinks for CPU/GPU anymore?

Nickel does stain a little but you can get 90% of it cleaned with alcohol/Fitz polish etc. Any kind of stain has been shown to not cause any performance degradation. Let's be fair paste stains as well over time.

Here is a video with liquid metal corrosion testing:

LM is definitely for advanced users and the warranty concerns should always be considered. Some manufacturers are ok with repaste/LM and others like Minisforum will void the warranty as soon as you remove the heatsink (Why they added that stupid adhesive cpu heatsink cover). Any time I have a nickel plated/copper heatsink and bare die I am going to put LM on it because I know the results it gives. If the CPU had a heat spreader I would of applied Artic Silver. Anything that helps a machine run cooler will help longevity. I would not want to run MS-01 under big loads 24/7 with the paste they used.

If you have never used LM before please be careful, if it scares you just use a good paste. Don't want anyone to mess up their machine. I have a lot of experience with LM and wanted to show the potential using it in MS-01.
 
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GreenAvacado

Active Member
Sep 25, 2022
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View attachment 35074
View attachment 35075

Copper diffusing/plating there is no performance impact, it continues to cool just as good with the initial application of LM.

Aluminum is in the middle and the one to be avoided. Does anyone even make aluminum heatsinks for CPU/GPU anymore?

Nickel does stain a little but you can get 90% of it cleaned with alcohol/Fitz polish etc. Any kind of stain has been shown to not cause any performance degradation. Let's be fair paste stains as well over time.

Here is a video with liquid metal corrosion testing:

LM is definitely for advanced users and the warranty concerns should always be considered. Some manufacturers are ok with repaste/LM and others like Minisforum will void the warranty as soon as you remove the heatsink (Why they added that stupid adhesive cpu heatsink cover). Any time I have a nickel plated/copper heatsink and bare die I am going to put LM on it because I know the results it gives. If the CPU had a heat spreader I would of applied Artic Silver. Anything that helps a machine run cooler will help longevity. I would not want to run MS-01 under big loads 24/7 with the paste they used.

If you have never used LM before please be careful, if it scares you just use a good paste. Don't want anyone to mess up their machine. I have a lot of experience with LM and wanted to show the potential using it in MS-01.
Ok, cool. Good to know.

So in your experience you don't see any possibility of LM chewing through the nickel coating and making its way into aluminum over time? I will be experimenting in LM soon, 20C difference is hard to pass.
 

Maunose

New Member
Feb 29, 2024
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Same result here with liquid metal (Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme). Temps are 20+ degrees celsius lower than before.
Before I apply liquid metal, my cpu temp was hitting 80 to 90 degrees while transcoding a video with hardware acceleration properly configured, now it stays on low 60s.
If you know what you're doing, liquid metal is the way to go with these machines, just keep in mind that by applying liquid metal on this CPU you are voiding the warranty.
 

FingerBlaster

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Feb 27, 2019
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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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benefits of lower temps?
It would take some detailed benchmarks to confirm, but you SHOULD see slightly higher overall performance. Each core should be able to sustain higher clocks for longer before thermal controls cause them to back off.

Of course, this is all based on the engineer's most terrifying word: SHOULD... :)
 
Jan 30, 2016
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Can confirm the following works fine:

LSI 9207-8E PCIe SAS card
Kingston Fury Impact PnP 64GB (2x32GB) 5600MT/s DDR5 CL40 (KF556S40IBK2-64)
 

GreenAvacado

Active Member
Sep 25, 2022
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This one is related to BIOS >> Power Settings

"Power Limit 1" = 6,0000mW (60W default)

"Power Limit 2" = 80,000mW (80W default)

What are these limits for and when and how they are exercised? Is first one non-turbo ceiling and latter turbo power limit?
 

00riddler

New Member
May 14, 2017
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PL1 (permanent power consumption, corresponds to the TDP)
PL2 (maximum permitted power consumption)
Tau (the maximum time that PL2 may be present) for the power consumption under load

Not sure if you can set TAU, but in standard it should be 28 seconds.
 
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wadup

Member
Feb 13, 2024
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This one is related to BIOS >> Power Settings

"Power Limit 1" = 6,0000mW (60W default)

"Power Limit 2" = 80,000mW (80W default)

What are these limits for and when and how they are exercised? Is first one non-turbo ceiling and latter turbo power limit?
Thanks for pointing this out. Here is a screenshot of the defaults and descriptions:

Screenshot 2024-03-01 025414.png

Here are the specs for 13900H:
Screenshot 2024-03-01 023729.png

Tcc Activation Offset is a thermal control for laptops where you can lock in a Temp. From what I am reading 0 disables Tcc and for those of us where temperatures are nowhere near 100C I don't know why we would need this one enabled.

Power Limit 1 and 2 is weird because it's set to 60000 and 80000 but the specs on the 13900H is 115W. I was curious so I changed Power Limit 2 to 115000 and system posted and booted without issue.

I then settled on these settings just turning everything off:
Screenshot 2024-03-01 024815.png

Correct me if I am wrong but why would we want any power limits or Thermal Control? My setup never exceeds 65C (Most of the time it is at 37C) with liquid metal and documentation online says the 13900H can take 100C.

So are these settings low due to Minisforum being overly cautious etc?

Let me know your thoughts maybe someone on here really understands these settings.
 
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